dangerous

Most of the time, Terry takes Marlow on the evening walk on his own. Usually I’m either too sleepy or I don’t feel like giving the neighborhood mosquitoes a meat buffet on my body.

Two nights ago, I decided to go with Terry when we heard a car speeding down our street. This wasn’t out of the norm because tons of people like to go fast in this 25 mph zone. But then we started to hear a couple out of control skids and then BOOM! Twenty feet in front of us, the car drives straight into a parked landscaping truck at about 50-60 mph. A couple seconds later, two guys got out and started jogging away (Terry said they were limp-jogging). Then a couple seconds after that, the driver gets out and starts running away. My first thought was “GREAT! They’re not hurt enough to go jog for help! I wonder which condo they will knock on.”

But in reality, they were RUNNING AWAY FROM THEIR STOLEN VEHICLE! Mutha futhers. I could have become a hero if only I had run after them and knocked them unconscious with my Maglite. And don’t give me the “they could have had weapons” talk because the car was smashed in all the way up to the windshield so they had to be dazed. Terry and I were the only ones to witness the entire thing but the cops said we don’t qualify as witnesses unless we can identify the driver in a line-up and it was way too dark for that.

What were we thinking when all that happened?Terry thought the people in the car were dead. I thought we were going to die when the screeching was approaching us.

The next afternoon I took Marlow on the same walk and when I got to that area, I started to feel anxious like I had PTSD. I’m sure I’ll get over the feeling of dying but it’s really a strange phenomena. I can’t explain it. You constantly think of “if only” scenarios and what could have happened if other elements were into play (ex. if we didn’t let Marlow stop as much then we’d be closer).

Okay, so we don’t live in the hood. It’s actually a pretty nice area with minimal crime minus the occasional illegal dumping, leftover shopping carts, and mugging (this happened once). But things like hit and runs sort of spill over from other, more hood-ish parts of the city. The thought of living in a cookie cutter place such as my college city of Irvine creeps me out but then when stuff like hit and runs happen, I get equally creeped out. Where can I live then?